The Mineral Kiss

My new home was a crumbling Victorian in Harlow’s Hollow, a town that clung to the Appalachian foothills like a barnacle. The place was famous for its spring, a churning blue eye that never froze, even in the dead of January. The town’s history was steeped in blood and faith; soldiers from a forgotten war had bathed in its waters, seeking cures for their shattered bodies and minds. I’d moved there for the quiet, for the cheap rent, and for the strange sense of being watched—a sensation I’d mistaken for peace.

My apartment was above a shuttered apothecary, and from my window I could see the old bathhouse, its columns cracked and stained, its windows like empty sockets. The spring itself was a ten-minute walk through a park where the trees grew in crooked, arthritic angles. I tried to dismiss the town’s whispers, the way the locals avoided the bathhouse after dark, the way they spat when they said the name ‘the Mineral Kiss.’

The first time I felt it, I was half-asleep on my sofa. A faint electric prickle blossomed on my shoulder, as if a spider web had drifted across my skin. I swatted at it, but the feeling only grew, intensifying into the distinct pressure of fingers. They pressed into my trapezius, kneading with a knowing, sensual rhythm. I jerked upright, but the room was empty. I chalked it up to static, to my frayed nerves.

But it returned. Every night, as I lay in bed, the invisible hands would find me. They would start at my ankles, stroking upward with a feather-light touch, tracing my calves, my knees, the insides of my thighs. The sensation was maddening—both caressing and invasive, like the ghost of a lover I never had. I tried to fight it, to sit up, but my body felt weighted down, pinned by an unseen pressure. The hands would glide over my stomach, my chest, up to my neck, until they cradled my jaw with an unsettling tenderness.

I began to research the spring’s history, desperate for an explanation. I found brittle newspaper clippings in the library’s basement, yellowed pages describing a nurse named Elara Whitmore who had tended to the wounded during the great battle. She was said to be a woman of unsettling beauty, with eyes that mirrored the spring’s unnatural blue. Men swore her touch could heal, but there was a price. She demanded a ‘gift,’ a piece of their soul to bind to hers. When the war ended, she vanished, and the spring turned bitter.

That night, the hands were more insistent. They pressed harder, digging into my muscles with a force that bordered on painful, yet still laced with that terrible, seductive rhythm. I felt them slide up my arms, interlace their fingers with mine, and for a moment, I felt a cold, hungry presence leaning over my back. A whisper, like the rustle of dry leaves, filled my ear: ‘You have the mark.’

I looked in the mirror the next morning and saw a faint, blueish bruise on my shoulder, shaped like a print—not of a hand, but of a pair of lips. The water from my tap ran cold and cloudy, and when I touched it, I felt a jolt, like a static shock. The whispers grew louder, the hands more bold. They began to appear during the day, brushing my cheek as I read, tugging at my clothes when I walked.

I decided to visit the spring itself, hoping to face the source. As I stood at its edge, the water seemed to pulse, a heartbeat below the surface. I knelt and dipped my hand in. The water was warm, 74 degrees, but a chill raced up my arm. A reflection appeared beside mine—a woman with a face like cracked porcelain and hair that flowed like black smoke. She smiled, and her lips moved, forming the words I’d heard in my nightmares: ‘The gift is taken.’

I fled, but the hands followed me all the way home. They wrapped around my throat as I climbed the stairs, their pressure gentle but unyielding. When I finally reached my door, I found it ajar, and inside, the mirror in my hallway was covered with a frosted pattern—like the lacework of frost on a window, but shaped like finger trails. They traced a path to my bedroom.

Now, I sit in the corner of my room, my back pressed against the wall, watching the darkness. The hands are always with me now, weaving through my hair, stroking my face, tracing letters on my skin. They’ve started to write. I feel each stroke on my forearm: a name—’Elara.’ And then the pressure increases, and I know she’s not just caressing me anymore. She’s pulling me into the water, into the deep, blue, hungry eye of the spring, where I will join her, bound to the mineral kiss for eternity.

I can hear the water gurgling in the pipes, feel the cold seeping through the floorboards. The hands are pulling me closer, and I have no strength left to resist. Tomorrow, they will find the apartment empty, and the spring will be a degree warmer, and I will be part of the legend—another soul poured into the mountain’s chest, another story to make the locals spit and shudder, another ghost to caress the unwary who drink the water.

The last thing I feel is a gentle, insistent kiss on my forehead, and then the water closes over my head.